Who Owns Production When the Agent Does the Fixing? Governance in AI-Assisted SRE#
PyTorch Conference 2026 digest Program Wildcard pick 20–21 October 2026
Aditi Mewada — Apple
- Why: Not a networking topic, but a direct signal of where operations are heading: agents shipping fixes autonomously into production — the same production your change-management, automation guardrails, and identity controls govern. The accountability question ("an agent misconfigures a service at 3am — who is answerable?") will land on security and identity teams first.
- What: Governance frameworks, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop patterns for AI-assisted SRE: where autonomy genuinely delivers (faster MTTR, less toil, smarter alerting), where unchecked agent authority creates new failure classes, and a practical mental model for what agents should fix vs. flag vs. never touch. (from abstract only)
- How: A patterns-and-mental-model talk rather than a system; no empirical evaluation claimed.
- Where applicable: Any operations organization adopting autonomous remediation; conceptual, so weigh it as a framing device rather than validated practice.